A collection of images from our first fully in-person service at Second Pres. in 14 months. (Photos by Don Cochran and Bruce Lowrie).

  Tim Woodcock writes: One of the things I miss most about conventional, in-person church is the stained glass windows at 2 nd Pres. Yes, the people, the music, the sermons, too. All that can be experienced in a modified form online. But not spending time among the glow of the stained glass has affected me more acutely than I would have guessed. During the last two Sundays I found myself in the sanctuary for the first time in more than a year, hanging out on the sidelines rather than fully participating in the service, because Freya was doing a “Minute for Mission” one week and Katy was the liturgist the following week. Knowing that I would be at loose end, I had brought a sketchpad with me and spent some time communing with the images on the east side of the sanctuary (see below). While the significance of 2PC’s windows can recounted, as it is on the church’s website , here I’m only trying to get down some impressionistic feelings about them. Some  idiosyncratic highligh...

A haunting song recommended by Nancy Quigley, which she notes has "a lovely harmony and words of hope."

  On a recent Sunday, with near perfect fall weather,  2PC held three simultaneous outdoor church services at various locations, including this one in Forest Park (pictured above) and Tower Grove Park (below). This Sunday - Sept. 27 at 5 p.m. - there will be another evening prayer service but with a single location. Folks will gather at the top of Shakespeare Glen, near the Art Museum, and continue to do each Sunday evening for as long as the weather allows. Seating is socially distant and a combination of Forest Park's picnic tables and lawn chairs that people brought from home. Hope to see you there. And let's pray this beautiful fall weather continues for a few more weeks...

David Justice, a PhD student at. St. Louis University, whose work is centered on Martin Luther King Jr., reflects on a way he has found to cultivate a scholarly community during the pandemic.  One way that I've been staying connected during this pandemic has been a virtual writing group hosted through an organization called the Political Theology Network. Though the group got going prior to COVID widely spreading in America, it has turned into something that I look forward to each week (we meet Mondays and Fridays for two hours) as a way to stay connected to the world outside my apartment. The general routine is that the group members will chat for 15-20 minutes once everyone signs into Zoom, after which we all stay on the Zoom call until the end of the two hours, at which time we reconvene and share what we were able to accomplish during that time. "The goal is essentially to imitate the experience of meeting with a group of people at a coffee shop to do work. In a time w...

A very good piece in the Post-Dispatch  by Nassim Benchaabane offering an overview of how houses of worship locally are handled reopening for services. It mentions a couple of our neighbors in the CWE, the Cathedral Basilica and Central Reform Congregation. It’s quite a long piece. Even if you don’t read it in its entirety, be sure you scroll done to the bottom for a beautiful photo essay by Robert Cohen.

Tim Woodcock writes: When this pandemic is over – and the death tolls have been tallied, the data crunched and the policies critiqued, and the most incompetent politicians booted from office – only then we will be able to clearly assess the psychological damage it has taken on people. One aspect of this that has been on my mind recently is the way traditional rites of passages have been disrupted. We are already becoming used to births, deaths, and marriages being marked in creative but perhaps not entirely satisfactory ways. While I imagine a birth is much the same mix of chaos and joy for the parents as it has always been, will extended families members be willing to forgo the experience of cooing at a newborn and passing him or her from person to person? And if they do skip that, will the bond created be any less deep? Concepts like a “virtual funeral” – which was almost meaningless six months ago – are starting to take form and become commonplace. But does a virtual funeral ...